Generally covering the broad topics of computing and related technology.
I am in the interesting position at the moment of managing a team of people writing software who have almost no training or experience in software development. I find two things truly remarkable: first, that any modestly sophisticated working system can be made using code written by people that know almost nothing about software, and second, that smart people, who are motivated, can learn how to do things better pretty quickly.
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There is a wealth of literature on safety-critical systems, much of which points in the same direction: toward simplicity.
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5G will happen in the airy realm of radio waves. To get there, big telecoms have to harness underused parts of the spectrum. But there’s another crucial part underlying this system: lowly cable.
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Google says the fiber-optic cable it’s building across the Atlantic Ocean will be the fastest of its kind. When the cable goes live next year, the company estimates it will transmit around 250 terabits per second, fast enough to zap all the contents of the Library of Congress from Virginia to France three times every second.
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The internet consists of tiny bits of code that move around the world, traveling along wires as thin as a strand of hair strung across the ocean floor. The data zips from New York to Sydney, from Hong Kong to London, in the time it takes you to read this word.
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Based on hundreds of interviews inside and outside the company, Levy’s sweeping narrative digs deep into the whole story of the company [Facebook] that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.
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When Ed Catmull earned his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1974, with a thesis on three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics, he applied for jobs in academia. He did not get a single one. His academic interests eventually led him to co-found Pixar Animation Studios, create the breakthrough 1995 animated film Toy Story, and receive the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2019 A.M. Turing Award, along with his colleague Pat Hanrahan.
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We picked a hard goal. In our case, it was the replication of reality. And now things look so realistic that I often can’t tell in films, and I have a pretty good eye.”
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The actor’s new project, A Starting Point, aims to give all Americans the TL;DR on WTF is going on in politics. It’s harder than punching Nazis on the big screen.
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How Washington went to war against the Chinese smartphone giant, and how the runaway conflict could spell the end of a single, global internet.
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Sixty years ago, a sharecropper’s son invented a technology to identify faces. Then the record of his role all but vanished. Who was Woody Bledsoe, and who was he working for?
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And better ones won’t save it. To get past misinformation and tribal rancor online, we need to face why people really want misinformation and rancor.
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Administrators say installing listening devices like Alexa in student bedrooms and hallways could help lower dropout rates. Not everyone agrees.
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As past identities become stickier for those entering adulthood, it’s not just individuals who will suffer. Society will too.
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…memes, bits of cultural DNA that encoded society’s shared experiences while also constantly evolving.
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Without their phones, most of my students initially felt lost, but after just two weeks the majority began to think that their cell phones were in fact limiting their relationships with other people.
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Social media allows young people to explore how they express themselves, says Taylor Fang of Logan, Utah, the winner of our youth essay contest.
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Policing has always relied upon large amounts of information. But the scale and speed of its processing is different.
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Trust is complicated. Blockchain technology does eliminate specific, narrow reliances on trust, but it also requires new assumptions that might be better or worse for specific use cases.
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…tech companies are increasingly dominating both the use and implementation of undersea cables. … Tech giants may battle each other for Internet dominance, all while replacing old guard telecoms, but when it comes to laying undersea cable, playing nice seems to be the order of the day.
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